Small-Town America Today

The American heartland is changing. We go from one day to the next, mark the seasons come and go but miss the minute changes until they swell up huge enough to catch our attention.

If I keep going back to scenes of my childhood in the Philippines, here in Indiana I return again and again to how things used to be, nostalgic for something I never lived through myself.

If stories are nothing without time, we would be hard pressed to define ourselves without our individual and communal histories. Memories give substance to what we imagine. The present is a salad of the remote and recent past. Mixed with antique hand tillers and I Love Lucy ads small-town landscapes now feature Homeland Security sweatshirts and Ecuadorian wool overcoats.
In addition to sizzling elephant ears generously topped by crisp, coarse sugar crystals, we find not only Greek shish kabobs and burritos but pork rink made on site, chicharones.

Along with groups of VFW veterans in black leather jackets we see couples with Chinese and African babies, Indiana families and Chicano teenagers in America's heartlands!